Q 01/05

What is the capital and largest city of Iraq?

A) Sulaymaniyah

B) Fallujah

C) Baghdad

D) Nasiriyah

Answer · why

C) Baghdad

Baghdad was founded in 762 as Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, but that official name faded and Baghdad stuck.

Q 02/05

Ancient Mesopotamia lay between which two rivers?

A) Indus and Ganges

B) Nile and Jordan

C) Amu Darya and Syr Darya

D) Tigris and Euphrates

Answer · why

D) Tigris and Euphrates

Tigris and Euphrates water let farmers grow surplus grain, and that surplus allowed Mesopotamia's early cities to form.

Q 03/05

Which civilisation of southern Mesopotamia is regarded as the earliest known?

A) Akkad

B) Chaldea

C) Sumer

D) Elam

Answer · why

C) Sumer

Sumer faded as a separate people after Amorite invaders conquered Mesopotamia at the start of the second millennium BC.

Q 04/05

Which city was the largest urban centre in Mesopotamia around 3100 BC?

A) Nippur

B) Eridu

C) Lagash

D) Uruk

Answer · why

D) Uruk

Uruk, the Biblical Erech, may have given its name to modern Iraq.

Q 05/05

Which Mesopotamian poem is the world's oldest surviving example of narrative literature?

A) Epic of Gilgamesh

B) Enuma Elish

C) Atrahasis

D) Descent of Inanna

Answer · why

A) Epic of Gilgamesh

In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero finds a plant that renews youth, but a serpent takes it and he goes home still mortal.